Template width and image size

Is anyone able to help me make the width of my blog wider? As you can see, my vertical oriented images are much larger than my horizontal oriented images. I'd like to maintain about the same size on the vertical images when posting but feel that I would need to widen the width of my blog template to allow for the horizontal images to upload larger. Make sense? Any help would be awesome!

First off, a couple of suggestions. Keep in mind that the bulk of internet users are still on either slow broadband, or dialup. With your blog being so image-heavy, you should think about cutting down on the number of posts that appear on pages by going to settings > reading and reducing the number to say 3. With my 5mb connection speed it took nearly two minutes for your main page to load.

Secondly, I would suggest optimizing your images so that they are no more than 100k in file size. Many are around 140k or 160k and again - especially with image heavy sites - it slows page load times and sadly people on the internet have very short attention spans, and if something takes too long to load, they will normally click away.

Again, the above are just suggestions.

First thing to keep in mind with changing the width of the page is to again think of the visitors and the fact that the bulk of them are using monitor resolutions of 1024 x 768 which means useful inside-the-window browser space with a maximized monitor is going to be about 970px so you should keep the width from the far left edge of the sidebar to the far right edge under 1000px. Nobody likes to scroll horizontally.

As far as making your blog wider, it is quite easy. All you have to do is change the "width" in the .post section of the CSS. I included that section below in its entirety, but the only thing of interest is the last line, width. On the original it was set to 600px and I upped it to 700px which puts it outside the right end of your header right side. 670px puts it at about the right edge of the header.

Hi FJ: I concur with TSP that some users may be twiddling their thumbs on that may photos. On the other hand, for me it did load very fast... I wasn't waiting for any photos as I scrolled down. I'm on 7mb cable modem

One thing to add -- in case you didn't realize, some themes are flexible width -- ie: when the user resizes the window, the content width resizes (though this does not expand/shrink the photos). You might look at those to see if any of those attracts your eye.

Thank goodness for people like you! I am such a selfish twit! I've got a super fast connection of 16mb and never thought to consider that my viewers won't all have as fast a connection. I've limited my posts per page to 3 and hope that'll help. I really appreciate the suggestions! I've widened per your suggestions as well and I will just have to tailor the size of the images prior to uploading to get desired results. Many thanks once again, you guys rock!